2009 — 24 February: Tuesday
Yawn. Time for sleep. Tonight's picture is from Old Windsor in late 1980:
G'night...
Must have been tired...
... last night, 'cos I inadvertently repeated a picture I'd already published last month. Fixed that, so now time for breakfast.
Given the depressing reality of human stupidity, wilful ignorance, religious-inspired bigotry and natural tendency towards a "chocolate-coated bastard" self-interest, I've said before that a term-limited benevolent dictatorship is probably the "best" way forward. Though how you persuade a dictator to remain benevolent is a minor drawback with my scheme, of course, given the apparently universal corrupting influence of power at all levels of human activity. Still, this put things quite neatly:
To retain an inhabitable earth we may have to compromise the eternal vicissitudes of democracy for an informed leadership that directs. There are countries that fall within this requirement and we should use them to initiate more active mitigation.... The People's Republic of China may hold the key to innovative measures that can both arrest the expected surge in emissions from developing countries and provide developed nations with the means to alternative energy. China curbs individual freedom in favour of communal need. The State will implement those measures seen to be in the common good.
Explain this!
I keep an occasional eye on DVD releases. For example, I am keen to re-watch a 1997 TV series called "Underworld" — a tale of innocents, and not so innocents, in surburbia accidentally embroiled in a miniature gang war (rockets in the potting shed sort of thing). Shown only once and, needless to say, unrecorded because I didn't know what a gem it was going to turn out to be. Ditto, the first series of "Common as Muck".1 I snapped up the first series of "A very peculiar practice" — the delicious campus-set medical comedy drama depicting some of the frankly stupid follies of the Thatcher era in higher education and medicine — more or less as soon as it appeared on DVD in early 2004. Today, I note that Amazon in the UK is offering precisely one seller...
£79-90? Why, that's only a tenner more than I was prepared to pay for one or two of my rarer LaserDiscs in the 1980s! If all my DVDs appreciate in value to the same extent over five years or so, I shall be quite rich in years to come.
Call me an old cynic...
... but when the fragrant politician Jack Straw says it's not in the public interest to publish the Cabinet minutes discussing the legality of the war in Iraq, I smell a large, stinky rat. So much for the "sunshine" test. So much for freedom of information. So little for our guvmint's trust in its electors.
In later non-news
I can't kid myself (at 21:37!) that the new toy is going to show up tonight. But it's time for a break, so I'm off downstairs to inhale, as it were, the last half of Season #3 of Weeds. By the way, Christa, I treated myself to a new porcelain mug today. (Only £2, and I made sure it was both dishwasher and microwave safe.) After four or five cups of my hell-brew it's just as badly stained as the existing ones. So I now point the finger of suspicion at the rubbish inside the tea-bags rather than at my motley collection of mugs.